Participating Artists:

Stacie Ant - @whosthereplease

Tudor Ciurescu - @tvdor

Commonolithic  - @commonolithic

Nicholas Delap - @ndelap

Anneli Goeller - @s3lf13star / @digitalqueer

Nathan Harper - @nathan_harper_art

Matthew Keff - @matttkefff

Carson Lynn - @carsontlynn

Molly Erin McCarthy - @molly.erh

Adrian Pijoan - @adrian_pijoan

Trystan Williams - @trystanwilliams2
 

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Silicon Valet is pleased to present Road Rally V.1.0, a retrospective exhibition of work from the artists who participated in the first year of Silicon Valet’s Lot Residency virtual artist-in-residence program. 

 

Traditionally, a road rally is a specific kind of automobile race oriented towards amateur motorsport enthusiasts that takes place on public roads. Emphasizing precision, enjoyment of the driving experience, and camaraderie amongst drivers rather than speed, the road rally  is an inexpensive and accessible motorsport that offers inclusion of drivers with a wide range of abilities and experience. While other kinds of races and rallies involve dangerous and highly competitive conditions, road rallies instead seek to determine which drivers are best able to navigate a given route and identify key features of a landscape.

 

Building upon Silicon Valet’s extended metaphor as a “virtual parking lot for digital art,” this special presentation relies upon the metaphor of the road rally to push back against the exploitative and accelerationist conditions that permeate contemporary arts landscapes. Instead, and in line with the impetus for the Lot Residency program, this exhibition advocates for: fellowship amongst artists; critical examination of technological infrastructures, platform-mediated realities, and working arts environments; and, a holistic approach to artistic development and creative inquiry rather than a mad dash towards an imaginary goal or finish line. 

 

Each of the works in this show, and indeed the Lot Residency itself, seek to examine the concept of the ‘expanded internet artwork.’ A term coined by curator Ceci Moss, expanded internet art describes a comprehensive view of an artwork, rather than any one specific version or instantiation. An expanded internet artwork consists of all of the iterations and derivations of the work in all of its networked existence across platforms, spaces and realities. This can include but is not limited to the artwork’s software or source code, it’s physical installation environment, images or screenshots of the artwork, and circulatory conditions of the artwork such as press clippings, social media posts, shares, and comments. According to this view, no one way of looking at an expanded internet artwork is more true or valid than any other. Instead, the aura of an expanded internet artwork consists of all of these views compounded.

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About the Lot Residency:

The Lot Residency is an experimental program at Silicon Valet intended to allow an artist working in the expanded internet practice space the opportunity to explore the display and circulation capacities of social media. In the current visual culture paradigm, feed-based social media experiences play the dominant role in how images and ideas are disseminated and understood. Monolithic platforms in the Web 3.0 era create tightly regulated spaces that impose specific material constraints upon digital objects, and their black box algorithmic processes control how those objects circulate—and are thus experienced by others—online. 

 

By developing unique projects to be shared via Silicon Valet’s Instagram account, residents are able to experiment with the platform’s constraints and algorithmic processes, testing the limits of its capacities and exploring possibilities for alternative modes of online art practice on social media. After the social media portion of the residency is completed, each artist is asked to archive their project on www.siliconvalet.org. Pushing back against accelerationist modalities of contemporary network culture, these archival translations are approached in a slow and methodical manner that emphasize the preservation of the integrity of each piece and the healthy work flow of each artist.